BPay Group unveils 'Osko' brand for real-time payments

By Clancy Yeates

14 May 2017 — 3:13pm

From October, bank customers will no longer need to worry about BSB and account numbers when transferring money to a friend, or paying a tradesman. Instead, they will only need to know the recipient's "PayID." And the first service allowing them to make instant payments in this way will have the brand name "Osko".

Ahead of the launch of a $1 billion piece of payments infrastructure later this year, BusinessDay can reveal the brand names consumers will encounter when making payments on bank apps or websites.

But the NPP, as it is known in the industry, is not a consumer-facing brand that consumers are likely to hear about from their bank.

NPP Australia chief executive Adrian Lovney said the first thing consumers were likely to notice when the service goes live, expected in October, was their bank inviting them to register for a PayID. BSBs and bank accounts will still exist behind the scenes, but you will not need to use them.

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"Bank accounts will still have a BSB and account number, but their PayID is a friendlier, handle or address for their underlying bank account. So that could be their mobile phone number, or an email address, or an ABN or an ACN," Mr Lovney said.

The other new financial brand consumers can expect to see from October is "Osko" – this is the name of the first service that will run on the NPP.

Osko, which is owned by BPay, will initially allow customers to make and receive instant payments, through their PayID. Currently, it can take up to three days for payments between banks to clear.

In the not-too-distant future, Osko will also allow customers to request payments from others – such as a tradesmen sending through a bill – and it will allow for payments to be made with a statement attached.

BPay Group chief executive John Banfield said he hoped the word Osko, which was developed with an external firm and with input from the major banks, would eventually catch on in everyday language, as Google and Uber have.

"I would love, at the end of this, where we're simply making statements as friends, to say, I'll Osko it to you, or I'll Osko someone. That's really what we want to get to," Mr Banfield said.

Osko will be available from 70 financial institutions from the day it goes live, including all of the major banks.

BPay, which is owned by the big four banks, won the bidding process to deliver the first "overlay service" on the NPP infrastructure, and Mr Banfield said Osko is part of an important strategic move for BPay.

BPay's core product is a bill payment service, but that has been around for two decades. The group is competing against a wave of finance technologies that are eyeing the banks' dominant position in the payments industry.

"We felt that we had to really fight hard to win this business to create an innovative way of thinking about payments for the future for all Australians, that BPay created 20 years ago, to take that forward now for the next 20 years," Mr Banfield said.

Mr Banfield did not say how much the banks had spent on Osko, but said they had "invested heavily" in recent years to develop the service.

While Osko is the first "overlay service" to be provided on the NPP, Mr Lovney said he was speaking to other businesses in finance and technology about other services that might be provided on the platform in the future.